KIRKUS REVIEW

A Hollywood sitcom writer’s unabashed account of how she spent 10 years of her young adulthood traveling the world and having “sweet, sexy epic little vacationships” with foreign men.

Newman began traveling the world in her mid-20s. A painful breakup with her first love led her to board a plane to Europe, where she traveled all the way from Paris to Amsterdam. Two years later, she took a single-girl trip to Russia with her best friend. An encounter with a bartender led to the discovery of her libidinous alter ego, Kristen-Adjacent, and the start of her new life as “The Girl With Great International Romance Stories.” Newman then traveled to Spain, where she “tussled with a Barcelonan who…[wore] black panties,” and on to Canada, where she made out with a friend, then back home to obsess over the perfect man she never got but who invited her to chic parties all around the world. During hiatus from her work as a comedy writer, when all her other girlfriends were now “too married or too pregnant” to travel with her, she went alone to Argentina, where she took two lovers. One, a former priest, became an on-again, off-again flame and her reason for returning to Buenos Aires in subsequent years. On a trip to Brazil, she took up with two different men within a 24-hour period and had still more “vacationships” in Australia and Israel. Ambivalent about commitment to the point of neurosis but now adult enough to realize that she had all along “absolutely [been] looking for love,” the now late-30-something Newman finally settled down without regrets for her wild and wicked past. Though entertaining and, in its way, liberating, the book often crosses the line between uninhibited and overdone.

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